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Juan Vidal: Your Bookshelf May Be Part Of The Problem
One of my favorite passages from Black Boy, Richard Wright's poetic and searing memoir, which turns 75 this year, goes like this:
I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human.
Black Boy traces Wright's development from a troubled youth who encountered bigotry daily in the Jim Crow-era American South to a self-educated man whose reading shaped his understanding of society. I think about Wright's words often, these and others. Especially now, as cries from black men and women demanding agency reverberate across the nation and the world. It feels like the summer of our discontent is only just beginning.
Read more ....
Update: A post-modern euphemism for book-burning? NPR faces backlash after urging white Americans to ‘decolonize’ their bookshelves (RT)
WNU Editor: For new readers of this blog, 20 years ago I co-founded a free online library so that people who cannot afford a book can download one for free. It is the second oldest online library in the world, and it is here .... Bookyards.
Banning books is unfortunately nothing new. Over the years I have had my share of emails demanding that I remove books. This is why the cultural wars in the U.S. concerns me. What the above NPR contributor is pushing for is a modern day version of book burning that targets content from a specific racial or ethnic group. The Nazis used this same reasoning in the 1930s when they ordered books of “un-German” origin to be removed .... When books were burned in Germany (DW). Will this move to remove/ban books gain traction within libraries in the U.S. and elsewhere? I hope not, but they have the momentum. No one is opposing them, and they are already succeeding in the banning of movies .... HBO Max pulls Gone With The Wind amid George Floyd protests after 12 Years A Slave screenwriter says the film 'glorifies the antebellum south' (Daily Mail). Speaking of "Gone With The Wind". You can download Margaret Mitchell's ebook "Gone With The Wind" from here.
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